Recycling the oil weapon

Threat of an oil embargo on the U.S. is a bluff

December 05, 2001|By Amity Shlaes. Amity Shlaes is a columnist for the London-basedFinancial Times.

The U.S. is now mulling over a confrontation with Saddam Hussein. But there is a reluctance, particularly at the State Department, to anger the oil-producing nations of the Middle East.

Behind this hesitation looms the specter of the 1970s, when the House of Saud deployed the "oil weapon," an embargo on exports to the U..S that led to lines at gas stations and enormous concern that America would one day be cut off altogether.

Today, those expressing concern about President Bush's new challenge to Iraq note that the U.S. now imports a greater share of its oil than in the bad old days when the oil weapon was first brandished. They also argue that U.S. citizens will not support a war that jeopardizes their lifestyle in short, that citizens will not be willing to give up their gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles.

These concerns are misplaced. The U.S. ought not to let its oil preoccupation stop it from chasing down Osama bin Laden's Saudi connections or widening the war to halt aggressor states where it sees necessary. Oil shocks, if they come, are not likely to last long and the U.S. will not be cut off. The bigger danger is that old-fashioned oil diplomacy will deter the U.S. and its allies from combating the threat posed by many Middle Eastern regimes: that they will be ready to deploy nuclear or biological weapons in a period shorter than the average lifetime of a sport-utility vehicle.

That is the thinking at the Defense Department, where an internal memo on the fallacy of the oil weapon is being circulated this week. Authored by Ben Zycher, a senior economist at Rand Corp., a security think tank in Santa Monica, Calif., the memo provides a snappy revision of 1970s history with important implications for current policy.

But to the history. Back in 1973, following the Yom Kippur War, the House of Saud declared an embargo on the U.S. and the Netherlands as punishment for their support of Israel. It also, and importantly, led the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in a production cut. The market responded and prices rose fourfold. OPEC said relief would come when Israel withdrew completely from areas it had claimed in the Six-Day War and when the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people were restored.

But never, at any time, notes Zycher, did the U.S. in fact lose access to oil. Supplies were available on the global market albeit at a higher price at all times. It was the production cut, not the embargo per se, that caused the price rise.

The long gas station lines that are etched into American memories were due, Zycher reminds us, to domestic policy: the decision by the Nixon administration in August 1971 to impose price controls on oil. The administration, for its part, rationalized its action by telling itself it was weaning Americans off their heavy dependence on Arab oil. In other words, the government was forcing consumers to share its own fears about oil dependence. But they were not necessarily realistic fears.

This is so for simple economic reasons. Oil, like any other commodity, is fungible. In the same way that water in the bath flows around the duck, oil flows around embargoes. OPEC and anyone who chooses to join it in a production cut may succeed in lowering the water in that great bath that is the international oil market for a time and in raising prices.

But any act of hostility directed at a specific country or region by another does not achieve the desired isolating effect.

This, of course, is a lesson Iraq has taught the U.S., by circumventing the 1990s embargoes on the country. But the failure of embargoes also happened to have been studied, 20 years ago, by Douglas Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy. Soon after the embargo, multinational companies that distributed Arab oil juggled supplies of non-Arab oil so that the shortfall was shared by all oil-importing nations.

Specifically, pointed out Feith, during the October 1973 to March 1974 embargo period, crude oil supplies in the U.S. grew tightest in February 1974 and even they were only 5.1 percent lower then the daily average for the first three-quarters of the preceding year. What is more, the Netherlands, singled out by the Arabs, experienced less of a shortfall than France and Britain, the countries that led western Europe's pro-Arab political initiative. In addition, the Arab states of that period ended their reduction plan and embargo without winning their political demands.

To be sure, OPEC countries could drive up oil prices enough to cause great pain to the world economy in the short term.

But Zycher argues that they will not. Dictatorships, like any government, need revenue.